Title:AUSTRALIAN NATIVE FERNS: SELECTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF COMMERCIALLY ACCEPTABLE FORMS

Author:A.G. Sonter

pp: 269-273

Abstract:The New Environment, The progress of modern civilisation has little feeling or sentiment for plants that lack compatibility with the new environment it creates. Among the most severe casualties are the indiginous or "native" ferns. In Australia, without positive action, many exquisitely beautiful and uniquely different native fern forms forms are virtually doomed to extinction.

Not only is their natural habitat being physically eliminated by man's machines, drowned under feet of water by his dams, buried under the concrete tanks of his sewage treatment works, swamped by the excessive floods that follow his urban and rural development, and poisoned by his polluted creeks and rivers, but the natural habitats themselves are being invaded by foreign and devastating forms of life.

Lantanas and privets are ravaging our secluded gullies and gorges; imported snails and slugs are chumping their way through millions of fern prothalli every night; imported strains of grasses and weeds are